Author: Hal Bidlack

Hal Bidlack My father was drafted into the United States Army while in his third year of college in the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He served for the duration of World War II, rising to the highest enlisted rank at the time. Due to his ability to type, he was pulled from…

Hal Bidlack As is always the case, too many stories in Colorado Politics caught my eye this week, and I’m very tempted to write about a recent story regarding the efforts of some Douglas County Republicans to make their county a “home rule” county. Simply put, home rule status allows a county or a city…

Hal Bidlack As I’ve mentioned before, back in 1981 when my late first wife and I registered to vote as Democrats in Wyoming, the clerk joked we increased the number of Dems in Wyoming by a third. It’s not quite that bad, but clearly the GOP-dominated state government wants to make sure no Dems gain…

Hal Bidlack As is all too often the case, there are far too many recent Colorado Politics stories that merit examination than there is room to write about. So please forgive me as I jump around a bit, there is a lot going on, and there might be homework. Given the current leadership of the…

Hal Bidlack Like many of you, I love the old comic strip “Bloom County”, which originally roughly ran from 1980 to 1990. And if I had the ability to include a photo in my column, you could see I have a stuffed Opus the Penguin from that very clever cartoon sitting next to my computer.…

Hal Bidlack One of the challenges of writing a weekly column is deciding what not to talk about, even though it seems really compelling. I’ll like to write, for example, about a certain orange-colored president who just issued an order to expel 500,000 migrants who were here in the U.S. legally under a program to…

Hal Bidlack It’s been an odd last week or so here in the great American West (hey, there’s a thought, given a certain felon’s recent renaming actions — which he can’t actually do, but I digress — maybe President Donald Trump will rename the Rocky Mountains to the “American Mountains.” They can look kind of…

Hal Bidlack As I’ve mentioned roughly 126 times through the years, after my military career I worked in the Colorado Springs office of U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet for four years. It was just me and my direct boss in that office, with the occasional intern. It was intense work, and by the end I admit…

Hal Bidlack As my regular reader (Hi, Jeff!) will recall, I often mention how much I enjoy a weekly feature in Colorado Politics, the Out West Roundup. Skillfully collected and edited by ace reporter Ernest Luning, this column reminds us there is more to the American west than, say, just Colorado and California. In this…

Hal Bidlack Back in the late 1990s, I had the honor of being — during summer academic breaks from teaching at the AF Academy — assigned to the National Security Council (NSC) at the White House. Some of my work we can talk about, some we can’t, but it was a thrill every day to take…